- - 'It's been a nightmare' — College Football Playoff coaches juggling multiple jobs amid wonky calendar

Ross Dellenger December 17, 2025 at 11:07 PM

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On the campus of James Madison, two head football coaches are hard at work.

Within the JMU football operations center, outgoing coach and new UCLA coach Bob Chesney and his coaching staff are grinding on preparations for the biggest game in the school’s history — the College Football Playoff bout on Saturday night at Oregon.

Less than a mile away, inside Hotel Madison, new JMU coach Billy Napier and his staff are knee-deep in preparations for the next version of the JMU football team — scouting players, assembling a staff and examining the transfer portal.

Every now and again, these two intersect. For instance, Napier attends most practices, watching Chesney coach Napier's future players from afar. The two, Chesney and Napier, have even met to share information — Napier helping with Chesney’s transition to the power conference level and west coast (Napier has experience in both), and Chesney helping Napier’s transition to JMU.

In the middle of it all is a chance at one of the biggest upsets in college football history.

“The three of us — me, Bob and Billy — have an agreement that the most important thing is the 2025 team,” JMU athletic director Matt Roan said. “We are proving you can work together for the betterment of a team and program. Now, is it awkward? Yeah, there is an awkwardness to it, but we’ve handled it as good as we could have.”

After all, Roan added, “What’s the alternative?”

As this year’s College Football Playoff revs up with four first-round games this week, one thing has impacted a majority of the 12-team field: the coaching carousel.

Eight playoff-bound teams have experienced coaching staff turnover to some degree.

Three programs have lost or will soon lose their head coach (JMU, Ole Miss and Tulane). Two teams, Texas A&M and Oregon, have each lost both their offensive and defensive coordinators — three of them (Collin Klein, Will Stein and Tosh Lupoi) to head coaching gigs. Ohio State’s offensive coordinator, Brian Hartline, and Alabama’s receivers coach, JaMarcus Shephard, have accepted head coaching jobs at USF and Oregon State, respectively.

And how could anyone forget about what happened in Oxford, Mississippi, where five offensive assistant coaches, including coordinator Charlie Weis Jr., followed Lane Kiffin to LSU, only to awkwardly return for the postseason run.

Lane Kiffin made the biggest splash of the prolonged college football coaching carousel with a drama-filled move to LSU. (Tyler Kaufman/Getty Images) (Tyler Kaufman via Getty Images)

While all but Kiffin are remaining at their gigs through the end of their teams' playoff stretch, the juggling act is intense enough to beg a couple of questions: Will their team’s play be impacted by the situation? And is there a way to avoid the carousel’s infringement on the postseason?

“We’ve got to fix the calendar,” said Will Hall, the former Tulane assistant who will replace Jon Sumrall as head coach after the Green Wave’s playoff run ends. “We are the only sport in the world where free agency for players and coaches begins in the middle of the season.”

An expanded playoff has further complicated an already-frenetic time — mid-November through mid-January — in the sport of college football.

In that span, teams are completing their regular seasons; preparing or playing in bowls and, now, playoff games; attempting to retain their current roster while signing a new class during the December early signing period; scouring the transfer portal (i.e. tampering) to prepare for its opening in January; hiring, firing and attempting to retain coaches; and, oh by the way, players are completing their final exams.

Whew.

Shifting and shrinking the portal window from December to January hasn’t necessarily produced the desired effect. In fact, the coaching hiring cycle has accelerated faster than ever and players are already announcing their portal entrance weeks before January arrives.

How does all of this get fixed? Some believe it isn’t possible as long as college football is tethered to higher education. The university’s academic calendar makes it virtually impossible to structure college football in the same way as the NFL, where free agency and coaching transitions mostly unfold after the playoffs.

Most spring semesters begin in the middle of the playoffs in early to mid-January.

“I don’t think there is a way to avoid it,” Chesney said. “The NFL doesn’t have to worry about players enrolling in classes. If everybody started in February [class], you could do it then.”

Bob Chesney and James Madison are still alive in the College Football Playoff after he took the UCLA head coaching job. (Hans Gutknecht/Getty Images) (MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images via Getty Images)

However, a group of college athletic administrators is reigniting the topic. Members of the NCAA Football Oversight Committee are in the midst of exploring a holistic examination of the 365-day football calendar.

Should Week Zero be opened to all teams (right now, teams need a waiver)? Can the entire regular season eventually be moved up? Is the portal in the right place? What becomes of spring practice or the proposed summer OTAs? And should the early signing period move back to February or forward to the summer?

Another unanswered question: Will the playoff expand beyond 12 teams? That answer — officials are mostly studying a 16-team format — may dictate the answer to a lot of those questions.

So, what is the solution to all of this? How do you stop the madness of teams preparing for some of the biggest games in school history while juggling coaching staff hirings and firings and player re-signings?

“I don’t feel comfortable saying, ‘Here’s the answer!’” said Texas A&M athletic director Trev Alberts.

Alberts says the “chief challenge” in college football is that it is devoid of “centralized decision-making” — a point made by many through the years who argue that a new entity, board and/or commissioner is needed for a sport whose governance is fractured among conferences with differing missions, ideals and geographic and cultural footprints.

“Everybody is doing what they should be,” Alberts said. “Every commissioner is fighting for the membership they lead. Many times, those are cross purposes. There isn’t centralized decision-making. Could you get to a point where that is the case? I think so. But I’m not naive to know that a lot of the pain we’re going through right now is ultimately necessary to get where you want to go.”

How long are we from such a setup? His coach, Mike Elko, has the answer: not close.

“What’s going to have to happen is some group or board together needs to make decisions for the best interest of college football,” Elko said. “It just seems like we’re a long ways from that.”

In the meantime, Elko has an offensive coordinator, Klein, juggling head coaching duties and preparing for the Aggies’ playoff game against Miami. In Oregon, head coach Dan Lanning has two coordinators, Stein and Lupoi, operating as head coaches for Kentucky and Cal, respectively, while gearing up for the JMU Dukes.

In Oxford, Pete Golding is making his head coaching debut leading Ole Miss to its first-ever playoff game with a staff of five assistant coaches who have signed contracts with a rival school in the same conference. Golding has intentionally not changed Ole Miss’ practice schedule, meeting times, etc. in order to retain a level of consistency for the players.

However, he has brought in new offensive coaching hires who, like Napier at JMU, are mostly observing.

“Anybody for the 2026 piece of this is [for] retention of your current roster, being here available for your current roster, to meet them,” Golding said. “A lot of players want to have an idea of who they are going to play for.”

Meanwhile, down in New Orleans, Hall, the new Tulane head coach, is at least for one more week still occupying his offensive assistant role under Sumrall, the new Florida coach finishing out Tulane’s season.

“Coach Sumrall said it: ‘I got two phones, two jobs and two hours of sleep,’” Hall said with a laugh during an interview this week. “I’m kind of in the same role. But both of my jobs are in the same town!”

At JMU, Chensey’s gig is a world away. As it turns out, that’s a positive. The three-hour time difference from Los Angeles to Virginia helps.

By day, he works on JMU. By night, he works on UCLA.

It makes for some long days. He’s on the phone until midnight East Coast time dealing with the Bruins and he’s out of the house by 6 a.m. for team meetings at JMU.

“I’m fortunate to have that three hours,” he said. “It allows you to balance even though it makes my day longer.”

In the meantime, about a mile away, Napier and his new support staff are reviewing film of current players, conducting coaching staff interviews and attempting, as best they can, to be respectful of the current team’s playoff run.

Napier is unlikely to attend the Dukes’ game at Oregon, he said, as there’s just too much to do back in Harrisonburg. After all, the expectation is that most of Chesney’s coaching staff is heading to Los Angeles as well as a handful of players. Thirty more players will exhaust their eligibility and a few others he’d expect to transfer.

Napier is planning to have 60 new players next year.

“It’s been a positive, but, look, it’s been a nightmare to do all these things at one time,” Napier said. “It’s beneficial for us to have a good showing in the playoff. If we win, then heck, let’s go to the next week!”

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Source: “AOL Sports”